In a word: tyro

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

TYROAthena may have spring full-grown and armored from the forehead of Zeus, but the rest of us have to start somewhere and work our way up. Everyone is a beginner at something, and we have many words for beginners: novice, neophyte, newbie, abecedarian, rookie, and today's choice tiro.Tyro (pronounced TYE-roh) comes into English from the Latin tiro, "young solider," "recruit," "beginner." The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1611: "Of those punies, those tyrones that are brought vp vnder those threescore, there are no lesse then a thousand and fiue hundred."(Punies is no bad word for beginners, either.) The word has been variously spelled as tiro and tyrone, but tyro appears to have emerged as the standard. The term is no compliment; citation after citation gives off the faint aroma of scorn or disparagement. But if you are a patient apprentice and keep your mind on the task, you, too, will eventually be able to sneer at the less experienced. Example: Watch Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, condescend to Plato: "It is difficult to acquit Plato ... of being a tyro in dialectics, when he overlooks such a distinction."